1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to optical amplifiers, and more particularly, to Raman optical amplifiers providing dispersion compensation.
2. Description of Related Art
In long haul optical communications systems it is desirable to maximize an optical fiber""s capacity to carry information (i.e. maximize the aggregate number of bits per second that can be transmitted on the fiber) and to maximize the distance that the signals can propagate in the optical domain before it is necessary to resort to expensive optoelectronic regenerators.
Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) is a technology for optical communications which uses densely packed wavelengths of light to effectively multiply the capacity of the optical fiber. Each wavelength carries a distinct signal. The performance of such systems is limited by optical attenuation which progressively weakens the optical strength of the signals as they propagate along the fiber. DWDM optical communications systems are practical because of the use of optical amplifiers which restore the strength of signals of all wavelengths simultaneously, to counteract the effects of optical attenuation. Amplifiers are typically selected to provide enough amplification to restore the signal but not more than necessary to restore the signal. Too much amplification would upset the gain balance, and can lead to impairment to signal transmission.
The most commonly deployed optical amplifier is an Erbium-Doped Fiber Amplifier (EDFA). An EDFA amplifies wavelengths of light within a large frequency band (xcx9c4 THz for a conventional EDFA at the time of this writing). However, although this frequency space is large, it is relatively small compared with the total bandwidth of the low loss window of the optical fiber. Thus, the EDFA bandwidth generally restricts the usable bandwidth (BW). A typical conventional band (C-band) EDFA operates from approximately 1528 to approximately the 1563 nm range. L-band EDFAs operate approximately from 1567 to the 1605 nm range. It is a fundamental property of optical amplifiers that in addition to delivering signal gain which strengthens the signals, they also produce noise (in the form of amplified spontaneous emission, ASE) which degrades the signal.
For economic reasons, it is desirable that the lengths of transmission fiber between these optical amplifiers be as large as possible. However, the further the signals must travel from one optical amplifier to the next, the more the signals weaken due to optical attenuation, and the more severely the noise added at each amplifier degrades the signal. The distances over which such signals can be transmitted are generally limited by the accumulation of such noise.
When such optical noise is the most important impairment, the quality of the signal at the end of the system can be improved by increasing the optical power produced by each optical amplifier. In practical systems, the ability to increase optical power is constrained; specifically because when the optical powers of signals in the channels in the fiber exceed a certain level, they create optical nonlinear effects (such as four wave mixing, self phase modulation and/or cross phase modulation) which distort the signals and impair their quality. Thus, it is very important to minimize the impairments arising from optical noise without increasing the optical power beyond the nonlinear limit.
In addition to increasing the capacity of optical fibers to carry signals by using DWDM technology, their capacity is also increased by Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) (i.e. multiplexing time-tributary signals at lower bit rates into multiplexed aggregated signal streams at higher bit rates which are transmitted over the fiber as a single serial stream of bits at the aggregated rate). The extent of such multiplexing is limited in part by the ability to process, produce and detect such high speed Time Division Multiplexed signal streams but even more so by the ability of such very short, very frequent pulses to maintain their integrity while propagating along long lengths of transmission optical fiber.
The most severe impairment limiting the data rate of TDM signal channels is chromatic dispersion. Chromatic dispersion is a property of the optical fiber which causes light of different wavelengths to propagate at different speeds. Any optical pulse is made up of light of a range of wavelengths and the shorter the pulse, the wider the range of wavelengths which make up the pulse. In the presence of chromatic dispersion, these wavelengths propagate at different speeds and this causes the pulse to spread out in time, with the longer wavelength components of the pulse trailing further and further behind its faster, shorter wavelength components as the pulse propagates down the fiber. The signal is impaired when the pulses spread sufficiently that they overlap with the neighboring preceding or subsequent pulses and can no longer be distinguished by the receiver.
The chromatic dispersion of silica, the material from which most optical fibers are made, is zero at a wavelength of about 1300 nm. At this wavelength, conventional single mode fibers, which are widely deployed, also have zero chromatic dispersion. Near 1550 nm, where transmission fibers have their lowest optical loss and where optically amplified systems using EDFAs operate, such fibers have high dispersion, typically 17 ps/nm/km. For such fibers, the typically 100 ps wide pulses used in 10 Gb/s systems spread in time so quickly as they propagate that data cannot be transmitted further than about 50 km before electrical regeneration of the pulses becomes necessary.
During the 1980""s, Dispersion Shifted Fibers (DSF) which have zero dispersion near 1550 nm were developed and widely deployed in some networks because of the potential to support higher data rates with very low dispersion. However, such fibers cannot support DWDM transmission because the impairments that result from nonlinear interactions between the different wavelength channels (primarily four wave mixing but also cross phase modulation) are more severe when the dispersion is small and the different channels travel at similar speeds. For this reason, for high capacity systems which combine high channel multiplicity dense wavelength division multiplexing with high data rate TDM on each of the WDM channels, the preferred transmission fiber is so-called Non-Zero Dispersion Shifted Fiber (NZDSF). In NZDSF the dispersion in the wavelength region of interest near 1550 nm ranges typically from about 2 to 4 ps/nm/km, large enough so that the nonlinear interactions among channels will not unduly impair the signal quality. However, the dispersion of NZDSF, while less than that of standard single mode fiber, is still large enough that for long-haul transmission (i.e., several hundred km or more) the dispersion-induced pulse broadening will limit the transmission distance for 10 Gb/s systems; for the higher speed 40 Gb/s systems, the limitations will be sixteen times more stringent.
Dispersion compensation, which reverses the impairment caused by dispersion, is a key technology for the transmission of high-speed TDM signals (i.e., 10 Gb/s, 40 Gb/s and more) over standard single mode fiber and over NZDSF. Dispersion-compensating fiber (DCF) consists of a fiber specially designed to have chromatic dispersion with a sign opposite to that of conventional single mode fibers (i.e., light with longer wavelengths travels faster than light with shorter wavelengths). Pulses which have been dispersed (i.e., broadened in time) by propagating over dispersive optical fiber can be narrowed to their original width, restoring the integrity of the signal, by traversing a DCF the length of which is chosen so that the faster traveling light of longer wavelengthsxe2x80x94which are the slower wavelengths in the transmission fiber - exactly catch up to the light with shorter wavelengths which had left them behind.
In the absence of distortion arising from optical nonlinearities, compensation for dispersion can be provided anywhere in the system regardless of where the dispersion was incurred. But, for signals in the nonlinear regime, it is important that dispersion be compensated regularly, with sufficient frequency that irreversible pulse distortions suffered between dispersion-compensating elements are small. Thus, dispersion-compensating fibers are often deployed in optical amplifiers, and often at each optical amplifier or repeater site.
The optical loss of DCF is significant. To compensate for the optical loss in a signal transmitted through DCF, optical amplification must be used. FIG. 1 illustrates a typical optical amplifier 100 providing amplification and dispersion compensation to a signal propagating in transmission fiber 105. Typically, the DCF 110 is placed in the middle of an EDFA 120 so that the amplification preceding the DCF (represented by 125) shields the DCF""s loss from the amplifier input, where it would increase the noise figure (degrading the noise performance); and the amplification following the DCF (represented by 126) shields the DCF""s loss from the amplifier output, where it would diminish the launched signal power (which would also degrade the noise performance). The additional optical amplification required at each repeater, to compensate for DCF loss, results in additional noise accumulation which diminishes the reach of the system and/or its capacity to carry information.
Distributed Raman amplification provides a method of amplifying a signal. Raman amplification is a nonlinear optical effect in which a strong pump beam in a common transmission fiber produces gain at lower frequencies, with the highest gain produced for light with an optical frequency about 11 terahertz (11xc3x9710 Hertz) lower than that of the pump beam. For a pump wavelength near 1450 nm this frequency shift corresponds to a wavelength difference of about 100 nm, i.e. gain is produced over a roughly 30 nm band around 1545 nm corresponding roughly to the C-band where conventional erbium-doped fiber amplifiers produce gain. As distinct from the case for Erbium-Doped Fiber Amplifiers, no special dopants (such as erbium) are required to produce the gain, and signals experience the gain not just in the vicinity of the pump but also over an appreciable length of fiber extending over approximately 20 km. By launching a Raman pump beam into the fiber span in the reverse direction of the signal so that it counterpropagates (i.e., backward propagates) relative to the transmitted signal, the effective input of the amplifier can be shifted backward in the fiber to a location where the signal, having experienced less optical attenuation, has greater power. In this way, the degradation in signal-to-noise ratio produced by the combined optical amplifier, consisting of the distributed Raman amplifier and the subsequent discrete Erbium-Doped Fiber Amplifier, is reduced by a large factor; this enables the signals to travel further before suffering the same degree of degradation due to optical amplifier noise. Distributed Raman Amplification can be used to increase the aggregate distance over which the signals can be transmitted without optoelectronic regeneration, to support higher bit-rates in each of the DWDM channels, to support more DWDM channels, or a combination of all three.
The magnitude of the Raman gain, and thus the reduction in noise accumulation, increases as the Raman pump power is increased. In practical optical communications systems, however, there are limits to the reductions in noise accumulation which can be achieved with Raman amplification. One limitation arises from the problems associated with the high power required to produce large Raman gains in transmission fibers, typically from 500 mW to over 1 Watt, depending on the characteristics of the fiber. Such high powers require interlock shutoff systems to meet safety standards and also pose the risk of damage to connectors.
A second, more fundamental limitation arises from Rayleigh Back Scattering (RBS). Light propagating along a fiber is scattered by the microscopic index variations in the glass, and some of the light scattered in the backward direction is captured by the optical fiber and propagates in the reverse direction. The power of the reflected beam is small, typically about 1000 times weaker than that of the primary beam. The limitation of Raman enhancement of noise performance results from RBS of the counterpropagating Raman beam. The back-scattered beam propagates in the same direction as the signal. When the Raman gain approaches 1000 (i.e., the Raman gain amplifies a propagating beam to 1000 times its power in the absence of the Raman gain), the back-scattered beam becomes so large that rather than enhancing the fidelity of the signal, the distributed Raman amplification severely degrades the signal fidelity and impairs the noise performance of the system.
Aspects of the invention include application of the recognition that, in a dispersion-compensating Raman optical amplifier which comprises a dispersion-compensating fiber (DCF) and a distributed Raman amplifier, the noise contributed to the system by the DCF is relatively large.
Generally, a Raman amplifier can be used in a DWDM optical system to maintain signal level across a span of transmission fiber, thus improving the signal-to-noise performance of the system and reducing the need to add regenerators. As discussed above, the ability of the distributed Raman pump to improve the noise performance of a system is subject to limitations caused by nonlinear effects and amplified spontaneous emission, and overall gain of the amplifier is subject to maintaining the gain balance. In an optical system using distributed Raman amplification and providing dispersion compensation using a DCF, the performance of the system is substantially limited by the noise contribution of the DCF. Accordingly, aspects of the present invention include a Raman amplifier providing dispersion compensation including a Raman amplifying DCF.
A first aspect of the present invention is an optical amplifier for amplifying an optical signal, comprising a distributed amplifier, a Raman-amplifying dispersion-compensating fiber amplifier having a dispersion-compensating fiber optically coupled to the distributed amplifier such that the optical signal is serially processed by the distributed amplifier and the Raman-amplifying dispersion-compensating fiber amplifier, and a first Raman pump optically coupled to and pumping the dispersion-compensating fiber.
A second aspect of the present invention is an optical amplifier for amplifying an optical signal, comprising a first distributed amplifier, a Raman-amplifying dispersion-compensating fiber amplifier having a dispersion-compensating fiber optically coupled to the distributed amplifier, a first Raman pump optically coupled to and pumping the dispersion-compensating fiber, and a third optical amplifier optically coupled to the optically amplifying dispersion-compensating fiber, wherein the optical signal is serially processed by the distributed amplifier, the Raman-amplifying dispersion-compensating fiber amplifier, and the third optical amplifier.
A third aspect of the present invention is an optical communications system for transmitting and amplifying an optical signal, comprising a span of transmission fiber, a distributed optical amplifier optically coupled to the transmission fiber, a Raman-amplifying dispersion-compensating fiber amplifier having a dispersion-compensating fiber optically coupled to the transmission fiber, and a first Raman pump optically coupled to and pumping the dispersion-compensating fiber, wherein the optical signal serially traverses the span of transmission fiber, the distributed amplifier, and the Raman-amplifying dispersion-compensating fiber amplifier.
A fourth aspect of the present invention is a method of amplifying an optical signal, comprising Raman pumping a transmission fiber using a Raman pump, propagating the optical signal through the Raman-pumped transmission fiber to provide a first signal output, Raman pumping a dispersion-compensating fiber using a Raman pump, and propagating the first signal output, received from the Raman-pumped transmission fiber, through the Raman-pumped dispersion-compensating fiber.